Re-creating Mrs Snowball's
1984 Shopping MachineIn May 1984 Mrs Jane Snowball of
Gateshead, England became the world’s first recorded online home shopper
when she bought groceries from Tesco.

In September 2008,
Michael Aldrich agreed to donate his archive of personal and company
papers to the University of Brighton and to digitise much of the material.
In May 2009 to recognise the 25th Anniversary of Mrs Snowball’s
achievement, the Mayor of Gateshead made a presentation to the Snowball
family. In December 2009 the Michael Aldrich Archive went online and was
opened to the public.

In 2009, Richard
Hibbs, a ROCC software engineer, heard of the Archive and agreed to donate
his collection of vintage hardware, software and associated materials to
the Archive.

In September 2010,
while examining the inventory of the Richard Hibbs Collection of hardware,
software and documentation in detail for the first time, a wild thought
materialised. Would it be possible to re-create Mrs Snowball’s 1984
shopping system using original vintage hardware and software?

Richard had
accumulated his Collection over the years primarily by dumpster-diving as
old equipment was discarded from ROCC offices. His motivation was his
interest in old technology. His colleagues thought he was eccentric. Until
he revealed it, no-one had any notion of the scale of his Collection. It
is a treasure trove of now extinct equipment. Richard’s fascination with
the old technology had led him to research the Technology History of ROCC
Computers, a continuing work in progress, and write a piece for the
Archive. Richard’s donation of his Collection to the Archive, his tireless
work on getting the old equipment working and his enthusiasm for the e-Fenix
Project have been invaluable.

The immediate
challenge of re-creating Mrs Snowball’s system was in trying to scope the
project. It was a bottomless pit of unknowns where we might not know
whether or not we could be successful until we had actually been
successful. We had a list of sundry bits of kit and associated
paraphernalia but we could not ascertain whether it was relevant, useful
or usable. Our first plan was therefore to build a team of people who
could carry out a feasibility study. We knew the kind of skills that we
would probably need and that meant that many of the potential team members
were probably retired or that they had experience of this kind of
technology very early in their careers. We needed help.

Luke Aldrich, CEO
of ROCC said the project was mad but worth a try and he would do
everything he could to help. Alan Gould, long time ROCC manager,
volunteered to be project manager. Richard Hibbs and Peter Luck, the
Archive webmaster and another senior ROCC manager, volunteered
immediately. Then we set about finding and recruiting the other members of
this team of volunteers. We needed hardware, software, applications,
telecoms and maintenance engineers for a start.

It took 6 months
to assemble a team. Every form of personal contact, social media, ROCC
pensioner lists, web searches, University of Brighton appeals was used.
And we were successful! Offers of help started to appear. John Phelan, who
had designed not only Mrs Snowball’s application but also the Bradford
Centrepoint/Wm Morrison system and had invented the online shopping
basket[ later re-named the online shopping trolley] offered to help
specify the re-created application. Dave Bunting, a retired senior ROCC
manager with years of experience on similar systems volunteered to work
with John Phelan and write the application. Dave is one of the few people
who can still program this old system. Peter Champion and Johnny Walsh
volunteered to help. Maintenance engineers Tommy Bowden, Andy Gale and Ron
Ditchfield joined the group. Via the University came Ralph Wood a retired
design engineer and Robert Schrifeen, still at the University, who had
worked on viewdata systems in the 1980s. The team met for the first time
on March 17th 2011. Although the project was located in Brighton the team
was widely dispersed throughout the UK so meetings tended to be virtual.

In the meantime we
started to gather equipment, software and paraphernalia at ROCC’s Brighton
office. It looked like a pile of junk and it was clear that some of the
items hadn’t worked for 20 years or more. It was also obvious that we were
missing some critically important items not least of which was a
television and remote . No television meant no project. Enter Stephen
Perry, then a senior ROCC telecoms engineer. Stephen said ‘ Find me a
1970s Rediffusion television and I will hook it up on-line.’ Ralph Wood
said he would make a TV remote to match the one Mrs Snowball used.

We were beginning
to construct a list of ‘unknowns’ and ‘don’t haves.’ It would have been
nice to have wiring diagrams, manuals, diagnostics, epromware and spares.
In the equipment inventory we had found a Teleputer. The Teleputer is
important because it was used in most of the Business-to-Business online
shopping systems. Teleputers can be seen clearly in the NISSAN video. This
Teleputer may be the only one in existence. It was not in good condition.
After cleaning it was clear that it had no video cable. Stephen Perry
volunteered to make one.

Once complete, it
was decided to switch-on the Teleputer. All reasonable precautions had
been taken. There was an almighty bang, the room filled with acrid smoke
and building evacuation was triggered. The team were howling with
laughter! Fortunately power supplies can be repaired. Old equipment has to
be treated with great respect. The main R2835 computer switched on without
any dramatics but there was a problem with the Cipher tape streamer.
System software was loaded by tape. The streamer and another we had found
were sent to specialists for repair and reconditioning.

The biggest
concern was the television. We knew it would be a big problem. Most of the
televisions that Rediffusion had manufactured were cable-tv models
unsuited to our purposes. All of the viewdata televisions had belonged to
ROCC. Shame to say that during one of our frequent equipment disposals we
had sold all these televisions to staff and even worse I had bought 4 for
myself.

And to my
everlasting shame, I put all of mine on a dump around 2000! Sadly the
staff who had also bought them had eventually junked them too. The
television we wanted didn’t exist anymore. Alan Gould then went on a UK
wide scouring operation to find a Rediffusion Mark 3 television, an
antenna model, which we hoped Stephen Perry could convert. After many
blind alleys he eventually made contact with Gerald Clode who runs the
Rediffusion site for old television company employees. Gerald agreed to
help and to run an advertisement for Alan and in August 2011 a working
Mark 3 TV was found in Rye, East Sussex. We had the television!

Concurrently to
all these other actions a huge sorting and organising activity was under
way as we tried to gather paraphernalia together. We found magnetic tapes
for the R2835 and floppy disks for the Teleputer. It seemed we might have
some system software but the media was old and potentially damaged .We
needed to get it transferred on to something more secure.

In September 2011
Dave Bunting reported that he had a prototype of the application system
running. He had used C-Check II to prototype on a PC. Once checked out the
software could be moved relatively easily to the R2835.In the meantime,
Tony Purser, former ROCC manufacturing engineer who had helped to build
the original system, offered to make replacement 15 core cables with
connectors, without wiring diagrams of course.

We had started to
get a little complacent. That was before the software became the main
issue. We had managed to get the Teleputer hardware working in spite of
Richard Hibbs’ observation –‘There is a strange smell coming from the
monitor. I am not sure whether it is the dust heating up or something
altogether more interesting….’ But the 5.25” floppy disks were proving
problematical. We had what we thought were system software disks. We
needed to copy them onto new floppies for safety and Stephen Perry thought
he could do this on an ancient BBC micro. After much smoke and the rebuild
of his BBC micro this proved to be impossible. So the decision was taken
to clean the read heads on the Teleputer’s 29 year old floppy disk drives
[ not used for at least 20 years] and load our master floppy. After much
coffee drinking, debate and procrastination it was loaded…… and seemed to
run correctly! Relief all round! Richard Hibbs and Stepen Perry then
devised a new strategy to make copies of the original floppies we had
found.

In the meantime
what can only be described as a mad nationwide Egg Hunt was underway.
Studies, cupboards, closets, garages, garden sheds, lofts, attics
–grandfathers were crawling into roof voids- were being scoured to find
anything useful to the project. It sounded as though some homes were being
de-constructed. Dave Bunting had produced the prototype of the Mrs
Snowball software and John Phelan was agonising over whether or not they
had got every detail correct. He was desperate to find documentation.
Dave’s prototype software was on a modern PC . It had to be moved on to a
1980s minicomputer. Enter Richard O’Neill Roe- the younger generation
comes to the rescue. He just saw it as a challenge!

December 13th 2011
was a red letter day. Richard Hibbs loaded the system software on to the R
2835 aka the ‘Classic’. Perfect! Then Richard and Stephen Perry copied all
the floppy systems disks on the Teleputer. The Teleputer was now fully
functional. There was palpable tension in the air. We had no spares and no
documentation and no-one knew how long these systems would run. The next
task was to connect the Teleputer to the Classic. The Teleputer has a big
spike-type telephone jack socket that went into a brown wall plug. It used
a five core cable rather than the three core cable of later jack sockets.
This was the standard Post Office viewdata jack socket never seen before
or since. Alan Gould was perusing every jack socket the Post Office had
ever made and still couldn’t find a match. Stephen Perry armed with an
assortment of tools and artefacts but, alas, no documentation, stripped
the Teleputer and went looking for the comms sub-system. Spying the five
wires he embarked upon a conversion attempt to make it work on three. The
first discovery was that the auto-dialler was pulse mode. The second was
that no matter how the wires were re-configured he still couldn’t get a
dial tone. The only solution appears to be to find a viewdata plug and rig
a conversion off the back of it. It is rather like trying to find hen’s
teeth.

Meanwhile Richard
Hibbs was trying to transfer the Snowball application software from a PC
to the Classic. E-mails were flying between Richard in Brighton and Dave
Bunting in Manchester as Dave struggled to remember the operating
instructions he had used so many years before. This would all be so easy
with documentation. We have a working Classic, a working Teleputer, the
Snowball application software, a television yet to be converted and
communications problems yet to be solved. It is hard to believe that we
have come so far. We were stunned to see the 28 year old Teleputer working
again.

By late January
2012, after a visit by Dave Bunting who journeyed from Manchester to
Brighton, we had the Classic fully operational and had loaded the Snowball
application system . The telecoms for the television and the Teleputer
were still problematical however and Stephen Perry had moved the hardware
to Egham for easier access. Everyone was trying to remember long forgotten
viewdata telecom trivia. Alan Gould was trawling the internet for obscure
telecom enthusiast chat rooms to search for ancient widgets or information
thereof. We needed some luck.

On the 7th
February 2012 we had some luck. Stephen Perry re-wired the Teleputer to a
modern BT jack, connected a modem and a modem simulator for 1200/75 bps
[the original viewdata specification] and had the Teleputer talking to a
lap-top. This was a mixture of intuition, improvisation, technical
brilliance and lots of luck. Alan Gould had found the modem kit. The next
step was to connect the Teleputer to the Classic. Then the last and
greatest hurdle had to be overcome – converting and connecting the 1970s
Rediffusion television online to the Classic. Here we probably needed a
miracle as well as luck and all the other things.

History was made
on the 27th March 2012 when Stephen Perry, Richard Hibbs and Alan Gould
linked the Teleputer to the Classic and ran the Gateshead SIS/Tesco home
shopping software over the link. Stephen Perry ordered cola and 101
apples- he meant to order 10 apples! The system worked perfectly. We had
re-created Mrs Snowball’s system! The final stage was now to connect a
1970s analogue TV online and repeat the transaction from the television.
The team identified two potential strategies. We definitely need a
miracle. Stephen Perry has been given the soubriquet ‘Snowball.’

On the 28th of
June 2012 at the Brighton office of ROCC Stephen Perry connected an
analogue 1970s Rediffusion TV to a 1980s BBC Micro and the system worked
perfectly! The next step is to connect the BBC Micro to the R2835 compute.
Stephen has found some Prestel software to be burned into an EPROM to
insert in the BBC Micro. He has a serial cable -5Pin Domino DIN to 25-way
DIN- but of course we have no documentation on line speed, parity, stop
bits, data bits etc to ensure compatibility between the BBC Micro and the
R2835.

We also need to
construct an infra-red interface board to receive commands from the
handsets.

Again we don’t
know the codes for the handsets but once we have found them Ralph Wood
will program the codes into the handset he has made to be a look-alike of
the original remote. When we have completed these tasks we can then test
the entire system – TV-Modem – R2835 and Teleputer- Modem – R2835. These
are not trivial tasks. We now need luck! We have come so far we are now
into the last lap.

It wasn’t easy and
it took a year but our luck finally arrived on Wednesday 5th June 2013
when a full system test was run at Brighton of the entire system including
TV handset and Teleputer. We had a fully operational, useable system. The
Team had achieved a magnificent and barely believable success. The world’s
first online shopping system was running again with the software used by
Mrs Snowball. Our next task is to find a museum to house this wonderful
piece of history.